Posts from the ‘update’ Category

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While we’re busy beavering away on the Lollipop update of Pocket Casts (which looks amazing by the way), we thought we’d give you a few new things to play with:

Pocket Casts now has actionable notifications, so you can download or stream episodes right from your phone or Android Wear watch. If an episode is auto-downloaded while you’re away, those buttons will change to play and add to Up Next.

Variable speed playback has been enhanced so that it now works with more than just MP3 files. On most phones AAC and OGG are also now supported!

We’ve fixed quite a few Lollipop bugs, like the skip buttons in the player getting stuck on a colour.

You can now choose exactly which podcasts you’d like to be notified about, instead of it being an all or nothing setting.

Auto download has been changed by popular request to download any new shows that come out. This is especially handy for people that listen to things like hourly news podcasts, that used to have to download some of these manually if they weren’t around when the shows came out.

So grab it if you haven’t already and enjoy your favourite podcasts just that little bit more. Speaking of which: Adnan totally did it by the way. No way that guy is innocent. Sorry…runs away…

Up Next playlist: no need to wonder what’s playing next, flick right on the now playing screen and see. Re-arrange items to your heart’s content, and quickly skip between them too.

Colourful Awesomeness: podcast authors have some amazing artwork. The new Pocket Casts automatically detects colours from the artwork and brightens the interface in subtle, but powerful ways.

Modern Android Interface: When Pocket Casts 4 first came out, it was everything that was right about Android design. Since then Android has moved forward, and now so have we. See your podcasts in a whole new light.

Enhancements Galore: We’ve re-written so many parts of Pocket Casts to make it faster, more robust and better than ever before. There’s a million little details that have gone into this update and we can’t wait for you to experience them.

Pocket Weather 4 for iPhone and iPad is here, and it’s a free update, so before reading any further: go grab it!

What’s new?

iPhone performance! Locations are back to opening lightning fast on even the oldest of iPhones.

Brand new iOS 7 interface, this wasn’t us just removing some assets and gradients, we reworked the entire app to make it cleaner and simpler.

We’ve redone the iPad interface, no more iPhone clone with cards, but something far more unique and forward thinking.

Background refresh: it’s amazing just how much of a difference it makes to have your weather loaded already when you open the app.

All new visualisations for chance of rain, never wonder when you will be rained on again!

On the iPhone, the cards can now be re-ordered.

There are too many other tweaks and enhancements to list here, go have a play and let us know what you think.

For those of you still reading, you might be wondering why it took a while to get this version out, I know a few of you were even on the brink of losing hope of seeing an update from us. Once we saw iOS 7, back in June with Beta 1 we knew that Pocket Weather had to change. We were busy working on Pocket Casts though, and figured we’d have plenty of time to get to that before the end of the year. Then in September, in literally the very last beta from Apple, our app broke horribly on the iPhone. Tapping a location could take up to 10 seconds before it would show you any data. This was horrific, so our first instinct was to patch that, then continue working on the iOS 7 update itself. Unfortunately patching that one bug proved impossible, without re-doing most of the app itself. Once we realised that we had but one choice: many months ago we pressed ‘File’ -> ‘New Project’ and started Pocket Weather again. It’s been a tough few months and for the first time we hired an external contractor to help speed things up (the amazing Chris Miles, who did an awesome job!), and we worked many late nights and weekends. Long story short, sometimes when we’re talking about what we’re doing the least, it’s because we’re working the hardest.

There’s a universal truth behind all of this: buying a Shifty Jelly app is always a safe bet. We always keep our apps up to date, and continue to strive to make them the best in their respective categories. Pocket Weather 4 is just another little gift from us, to you our loyal fans. We just hope that Santa won’t be mad that we delivered it earlier than he could have 😉

Note for our Android fans: version 4 for you guys currently in beta testing. More on that soon. 🙂

The long wait is finally over, today we bring you Pocket Casts 4 for Android, a free update to all our Google Play customers. We can’t tell you how happy it makes us to finally release this version to you all. It’s been at least 6 months in the making, thousands of hours worth of blood, sweat and occasionally even tears. So let’s talk a bit about what’s new.

Syncing and Backup
This has to be the biggest and best feature of version 4 by far. Basically you can (optionally of course) set up an account and store all your podcast subscriptions, playlists & playback progress in the cloud. What this enables you to do is seamlessly sync your progress with your other android devices, and as we update Pocket Casts on iOS and other places you’ll be able to sync to those as well. Even better is that this makes moving to a new device, flashing a new ROM or just starting fresh super easy. Just log back in and Pocket Casts will set you up exactly where you left off, including hooking up any downloaded files you might have on your phone/SD Card from before as well. During development I’d estimate between us we uninstalled/reinstalled the app about 100 times, and this feature worked flawlessly!

Powerful smart playlists
Another amazing feature of version 4 is being able to easily build lists of the kind of episodes you want to listen to or download. You can filter by an episodes playing status, whether it’s audio or video, whether it’s from a particular podcast, its download status and whether you’ve starred it or not. This lets you easily build a playlist of what you want to listen to which you can then sort how you like, and also choose to have the phone auto-download for you. It’s a game changer and I personally can’t go back to the old version because of this feature alone.

Built in variable speed playback
I can’t tell you how painful this was to build (hands up if you love native C++ code?), but the end resulting is amazing. No more expensive, crashy plugins to download to get variable speed playback in Pocket Casts. We’re the first podcasting app on Android to do this, and the difference it makes is huge. You can go all the way from 0.5x to 3.0x. My personal favourite is setting it to 0.5x, aka ‘Drunk Mode’ and listening to your favourite podcast host slur through all their words.

Stunning phone and tablet interface
We heard you loud and clear. Our previous iteration was a messy port of an iOS app built for Android 2.2. Times have changed, and so has our stunning new Holo style interface that works seamlessly on both phones and tablets.

Absolute control
Control your podcasts from the Notification Center, lock screen, headphones, bluetooth, etc. Basically your favourite app is only ever a tap or two away.

There are of course, many more features large and small, but for those you should really just go and grab the app, or find out more on our website! Happy podcasting to you all, from the team here at Shifty Jelly!

Pocket Weather Au, our very first serious app in the Apple App Store was released in September of 2008. Since then it’s been an amazing journey for us and we’re really glad that you came along for the ride. We went straight to the #1 spot in the store, and stayed there for well over 3 weeks. The thank you and suggestions have flooded our inbox ever since. Overall we couldn’t be more proud of what we built back then, and the many, many updates we’ve issued for it since (25 updates, over 4 years: view graphical history).

It’s an old image, sepia doesn’t lie.

The astute among you will note that in January of this year the updates stopped. That was when we decided, after 4 years and so much hard work that poor old Pocket Weather Au was starting to look a bit tired. We have learnt an amazing amount since 2008, about development, weather and had so many great suggestions from you, our fans and customers.

Now we know some of you well, and instead of reading the rest you’re just looking for the buy link, HERE YOU GO!

Ok, now that 95% of you have disappeared, the rest of you can read all about the new version here, on our website. There’s also a handy review by the fine people of MacTalk here.

Finally, we’d like to answer a few common questions that our current customers will no doubt have:

Is this a free update?

No, it’s a brand new app that costs $1.99 and runs on your iPhone and iPad. We’ve released 4 years worth of free updates to the previous version, and when making such a drastic change we decided to build a brand new application. One of the main reasons for this was to not force an entirely new app onto people who might not want it.

I’ve been waiting for ages to give you guys more money, why only $1.99?

We get offers all the time from people wanting to donate to us, or get us to charge more for our applications. We feel that for now $1.99 is fair price for an app you use everyday, and we don’t take additional donations. If you really feel strongly about giving us more money, convince a friend or family member to buy our application instead 🙂

I like the current version, do I have to update?

No. We intend to keep the weather servers that these are connected to running for at least another year, probably much longer. We have no way to update the app itself though, so should it break in future versions of iOS then there’s not a lot we can do about that.

I bought your app just recently…

We removed our old app for sale before posting this one, so there should be very, very few of you that fall into this category. If however you did buy our app within the last few weeks, and feel like you’ve been wronged, please email us, we’ll look after you 🙂

I have an Android phone, don’t you guys love us?

Of course we do, Pocket Weather Australia 3 is also available from Google Play here.

We are very proud and excited here in the office today, and we hope you are too. Our goal (we always set one of these before releasing a new app) is to reach the #1 spot in the App Store. We’re not bothered by whether that’s for 2 seconds or 2 years…we just want to show Apple, Australia and everyone that apps still matter, and it’s not all about games! So come on Australia, get into the Olympic spirit, and let’s get Pocket Weather Australia to that #1 gold medal winning position!